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Study Results Confirm Superior Efficacy Of T-SPOT®.TB Over QuantiFERON® And The TST In Detecting TB Infection In HIV Patients

Oxford, UK; 28th March 2007 – Oxford Immunotec Ltd, the T cell measurement company, today announced the publication of a recent study supporting the superior performance of T-SPOT.TB over other diagnostic methods in diagnosing latent TB infection in high risk patients in S. Africa who attended an HIV clinic. This study was conducted against the backdrop of the urgent need to control TB in Africa which has 9 of the top 22 countries with the highest TB burden and where the predominant driver to the spread of TB is the high prevalence of HIV.

The study, run in Khayelitsha, a deprived urban South African community with a high incidence of both HIV and TB, compared the ability of the traditional tuberculin skin test (TST), QuantiFERON-TB Gold and T-SPOT.TB to detect TB infection in patients with a high probability of HIV co-infection. The study enrolled 160 patients of whom 74 were HIV positive. All 160 patients were tested using each of the three methods noted above and the results were then compared to establish the degree of agreement between the results.

The key findings of the study were that:

  1. T-SPOT.TB yielded a statistically significantly higher number of interpretable results than either of the other two tests.
  2. In the HIV infected sub-cohort, T-SPOT.TB yielded a statistically significantly higher number of positive results compared to the TST; unlike QuantiFERON whose performance was no better than the skin test.
  3. Even in those patients with a low CD4 count, T-SPOT.TB was shown to be unaffected by immunosuppression; in contrast a trend was identified with QuantiFERON performing less well as CD4 counts fell below 250/mm3. At all levels of CD4 count, T-SPOT.TB was able to detect a higher number of TB infected cases.
  4. The data supported the conclusion that the greater proportion of positive T-SPOT.TB results resulted from a higher level of sensitivity in the test compared with QuantiFERON.

Commenting on the results, Dr Peter Wrighton-Smith, Chief Executive Officer of Oxford Immunotec said, “This study clearly demonstrates the superior performance of T-SPOT.TB over other testing regimes in a high risk setting.  These data support previously published findings which have demonstrated that the performance of T-SPOT.TB is not adversely impacted by HIV, a clear failure of both the TST and QuantiFERON.  As a result T-SPOT.TB represents the only choice for TB testing in high risk immunosuppressed groups like HIV patients.”